William W. Cutler III

Research and Teaching Interests: History of American Education;
American Urban History (especially material culture); Oral History; Family
History; Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching.

Personal Statement: My research and graduate teaching interests
focus on the relationship between education and American culture. I have
explored this relationship by studying the history of the school, the family,
and the material culture of education. I teach the introductory graduate
course in American history, a graduate course on the history of the family,
using oral history as the principal research methodology, and a general
research seminar in American history. My recent research includes the history
of the home-school relationship in America since the middle of the nineteenth
century and the material culture of American education, stressing school
design, public buildings, and civic art. I am currently beginning a new
project on the history the public school's role in the private lives of
students and faculty. It will consider school policy and practice
having to do with such matters as personal behavior, religion, and language.
I also work on projects having to do with the scholarship of teaching and
learning, which I have done in cooperation with the American Association
for Higher Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
and the American Historical Association.

Representative
Publications:

Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American
Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

"The History Course Portfolio," Perspectives: Newsmagazine
of the American Historical Association 35 (November 1997), 17-20. To
see Professor Cutler's online portfolio for History 67, United States History
to 1877, click here.

"A Church on Wheels: 1942-1963" ch. 8 in This Far by Faith: Tradition and Change in the Episcopal Diocese of PennsylvaniaDavid R. Contosta, ed. (State College: Penn State Press, 2012), 263-297.

"In Search of Influence and Authority: Parents and the Politics
of the Home-School Relationship in Philadelphia and Two of its Suburbs,
1905-1935," Pennsylvania History (1996).

"Symbol of Paradox in the New Republic: Classicism in the Design
of Schoolhouses and Other Public Buildings in the United States, 1800-1860,"
in Aspects of Antiquity in the History of Education, F-P. Hager,
et al., eds. (1992).

"Cathedral of Culture: The Schoolhouse in American Educational
Thought and Practice since 1820," History of Education Quarterly
(1989).

"Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Childhood and
the Family: A Reappraisal," History of Education Quarterly (1986).